Famed light-artist Turrell to open new art-history lecture series

Famed light-artist Turrell to open new art-history lecture series

BY JENNIFER EVANS
Rice News staff

In its continuing partnership with the museum community in Houston, Rice University presents a new biennial series of lectures, the first of which will be presented next week by acclaimed artist James Turrell.

The Department of Art History at Rice, in collaboration with the Menil Collection, is sponsoring the series that will bring major curators, artists, art historians and critics to Houston to deliver two fall and two spring lectures on a single theme.

The inaugural series, “Architecture and Museums,” will feature four leading figures in the fields of art and architecture offering their insights in lectures on the Rice campus and at The Menil Collection.

In the first lecture, Turrell will present “Plato’s Cave and the Light Inside” at the Menil Collection, 1515 Sul Ross, at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 19.

Turrell has been described as an artist of light, perception and spaces, and his work can be found in collections around the world. He is perhaps best known for a monumental work of land-art at Roden Crater in northern Arizona, where for more than two decades he has been transforming the extinct volcano into a celestial observatory.

Of his art, Turrell has said, “I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception and in some way, gather it or seem to hold it. So in that way, it’s a little bit like Plato’s cave. We sit in the cave with our backs to reality, looking at the reflection of reality on the cave wall. As an analogy to how we perceive — and the imperfections of perception — I think this is very interesting.”

The second lecture, set for Nov. 6, will be given by Terence Riley, director of the Miami Art Museum. His topic is “Modern Art, Modern Architecture, Modern Museums.”

Early in 2007, sculptor Maya Lin, creator of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, will speak, and the final lecture, in April, will feature Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, presenting “At Home in the Museum.”

The lecture series is part of a larger campus initiative to link Rice with cultural institutions in Houston. The lectures held on the Rice campus are generously funded by Rice alumna Suzanne Deal Booth as part of her larger efforts to support this campus initiative.

All lectures are free and open to the public. For more information about the lectures at The Menil, call 713-525-9400. For information about the lectures at Rice, call 713-348-4276. Additional information is available at <http://arthistory.rice.edu/events.cfm>.